Vulpes Vulpes
by Reddy Fish
Summary: Nick is a cop, Finnick is an outlaw. Not even that had put too much of a damper in their brotherhood, but Finnick's involvement in a major crime will change their lifes. Who is behind these crimes? How will this affect Judy and Nick? When will hate end in this damned city? "I can't believe you still keep my old guitar." "We never dissolved the band, did we?"
1. Prologue

Rain poured down over the floor and roofs of Savanna Central; a summer storm had brewed and the night was going to be a dark one. Despite the fact that the advanced climate control features the city relied on were usually the closest to perfect one may ask for when it came to keeping temperatures and humidity on a good level for each of the five main climate areas of Zootopia, sometimes the forces of nature were too much to handle. That night, Sahara Square inhabitants living near the border with Savanna Cental had been asked to be careful, as some rain was to fall, and the streets in the hottest area of the city were not intended to take any rainfall at all. Even the sprinklers in Rainforest District had been switched off. They wouldn't be needed that night.

But, despite the heavy rain, few drops would never reach the floor, as the small body of a fennec fox made them not end their journey onto their original destination but on his soaked, yellow fur.

His clothes were so wet that they felt like made out of lead, his breath was more and more becoming a string of panting and wheezing, and droplets of blood coming from an oozing bruise on his leg could have been audible when they hit the ground were it not for the thousands of raindrops falling from the sky.

He was being chased. Several cars followed him around the streets of his neighbourhood, which he was lucky to know like the palm of his hand. He made close turns around alleyways that did not appear in any map of the city. The darkness of the night played in his favour, and the fact that the cars couldn't get through the tight backstreets he chose to go for was probably the only reason he hadn't been caught. Yet.

He felt one of the cars right on his tail and decided to run and hide behind a dumpster in an alley connecting Walnut and Sousten. His leg hurt like hell, he had to stop and assess the damage. The cut was unclean, deep, and quite ugly overall. He'd need lots of stitches when he got out of that pickle.

He undid the buttons on his shirt and took off the soaked wife beater he was wearing under it. He then tore the sleeveless t-shirt into stripes and wrapped his right calf with his newfound improvised bandage. The white cloth turned red in a heartbeat, but it was tight enough to stop the bleeding a bit.

While performing this operation on himself, he didn't notice the lion and polar bear, both wearing blue, creeping towards him. Shit. He'd been found. "Freeze!" shouted the lion.

The fennec fox took advantage of his smaller size and run through a small hole on the fence right behind him. He got quickly spotted, and a dart was fired towards him. It hit the fence with a metallic sound, followed by the vibration of the wires.

"Damn," said the bear after missing his target. "Z-240, the suspect is running towards you," he spoke to a radio attached to his shirt.

The fox stepped into Sousten Street. He was very disoriented, the exhaustion and loss of blood weren't helping him. He still knew all the streets in the neighbourhood to a tee, but his brain was going so fast he had to stop for a moment to think.

And that was when he made a mistake. Immediately after stopping to take a breather, he got blinded by a car's lights and deafened by its brakes' screech. The loud siren and bright blue and red lights on top of the car made his disorientation even stronger.

A familiar grey furred bunny got off the police car, holding a tranquilizer gun in a hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. "Please, don't make me shoot this thing, make it easier for everybody. You owe him that," she spoke.

The fennec fox decided it was over. He knelt down on the wet floor, raised his hands and placed them on the back of his head. "It wasn't me, boo."

With a sad face, the rabbit cop approached the fox and began handcuffing him, while quietly reading him his rights.

"Finnick Fawkes, you are under arrest for murder and resisting authorities," she spoke. "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law," she kept going. "You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?"

There was no response, though. In fact, he hadn't even understood a word of what she had said. The only thing he could focus on was the red fox inside the police car, with his ears flat against his skull, his eyes fixed on the newly arrested fox and a devastated look in his face.

"Nick..." he whispered to himself.

 **Author's notes:**

 **Hi! I'm new here and I still have to learn how this works, so forgive me if I mess up.**

 **Anyway, this is a brief prologue for a story that I want to write on one of my all time favourite films. I rated M just in case (this story will contain strong language and detailed description of violent and gory scenes, but no explicit sex), let me know if I need to change the rating.**

 **Also, despite being (argueably) fluent in English, it is not my first language. This means that occasional grammatical errors may happen, and that I will use American and British spelling and vocabulary with little to no consistency. I will gladly take your corrections, though!**

 **Thanks for reading!**


	2. Chapter 1 - Not ready

The room was small, only a table and three chairs adorned it. The walls were the dullest shade of beige one could imagine, and the floor was carpeted and, under Finnick's chair, soaked. After all, they never gave him the chance to change clothes. They did give him a towel, that was nice of them. They had also stitched his leg.

Officers Bob Johnson, a lion, and Ivan Andersen, a polar bear, came into the room. The latter held a fat folder in his hands. With a very serious grim, he sat down on a chair in front of the fennec fox. Johnson stood.

"Mr Fawkes, I regret to inform you that you've been arrested for a major felony. The sentence for murder can lead you to spend quite a few years behind bars, more that you have left to live," spoke Andersen.

"Oh, and remember death punishment is not out of the possible outcomes, Officer Andersen," the lion added. He then smiled, and fixing his eyes on the fox's, he whispered, "you might get yourself into trouble, foxy." It seemed he'd be playing bad cop.

Finnick would not flinch, though. With a somber look and his distinguishable deep voice, he looked not to his questioners but to the mirror on the wall left to him. "Bogo, I know you are there. I will not speak to anybody that is not Nick and-slash-or his bunny girlfriend."

Andersen and Johnson looked at each other perplexed, and not only because of his boldness but because they had never heard his voice.

"Listen, Fawkes," said Johnson, wondering to himself how such a little fox could produce such a groggy old man voice. He grabbed his face from the cheeks and made him look towards him. "Hey, look here. I'm speaking to you." Having provoked no reaction from the fox, he added, "you're between a rock and a hard place, fox. You're in no place to make demands."

"In that I will have to agree with my partner, Mr Fawkes. You are being accused of murder. This is not mere trifle. We have enough evidence here," Andersen pointed to the case files, "to put you away forever. The only thing you can do to help yourself is to confess."

Finnick took a glimpse of said files and saw the picture of a middle-aged female Siamese cat. Her throat had been slit, her veins and arteries gruesomely cut and a pool of blood under her dead body. The gory image made him close his eyes and look away for a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, Johnson saw him flinch.

"What is the matter, Fawkes?" he said, holding the picture right against his face. "You did this."

No response.

"How did it feel, fox?" he spoke, now with a mellow voice, close to a whisper. "How did it feel to slit her throat? The knife, cutting deep into her flesh, opening every vessel with ease... did you enjoy the mess? Did you enjoy getting covered in her blood?"

No response.

Johnson got closer to the fox's big ears and whispered, "I bet you fucking loved it."

Then he got his response. Finnick took the picture from the lion's hand, gently put it on the table, face down, and looked straight into Johnson's eyes. "Fuck you." He'd been wanting to say that for a while. He then looked towards the mirror and asked, "what are you waiting for, Chief?"

Johnson pinned the fox's head onto the table. "Bad choice of words, fox." Andersen, on the other hand, looked at the mirror with the corner of his eyes. He knew the fox wouldn't speak.

On the other side of the one way mirror, surrounded by the darkness in the annexed room, the scowling cape buffalo could only mutter, "you little..."

"It was gonna happen sooner or later, I fucking knew it," Nick growled in the Police Station. His blood was seething, his eyes teary and his voice cracking. He grabbed a pile of documents from his desk and threw them violently against the screen of his computer before hitting the desk with his palms and shouting again, "I fucking knew this was going to happen."

Judy stood two metres away, looking at her partner with a sad frown. Because of his reluctance to show his true feelings, she had never seen him _that_ angry (and she would never tell him, but he was quite scary like that).

The snarls soon gave way to worried sighs. Nick sat down on his chair, while Judy looked at him, not knowing what to do. Nick rested his arms on the desk and used them as an improvised pillow before breaking a long, almost physically thick silence with sobs. It was the first time she had seen him cry. Only then did Judy finally approach her partner and rested her paw on his back. She still did not know what to say.

Nick looked up to his partner, and with tears in his eyes he breathed, "murder, Judy, murder."

"We don't know that, Nick."

"Bullshit," he responded, lowering his head back to the position before.

"It is important that we respect the presumption of innocence, Finnick is not guilty until-"

"HE OBVIOUSLY DID IT, JUDY!" he shouted his lungs out, showing his fangs. This led to some concerned looks from some of his peers, both for him and for her. "You were there with me, you read the papers with me. You and I know he fucking did it. Don't lie to yourself," he spat his words, furiously.

It was Judy who had tears in her eyes now. It was not scary to see him like that, it was heartbreaking. Nick, the jovial, funny and confident fox, was now sad, angry and broken.

Officer Jennifer Fangmeyer came closer to the two and touched the foxes shoulder to grab his attention. "I think you need to calm down, Wilde," she spoke softly, with the sad look on her face that every officer shared right then.

Nick looked at her, then at Judy, and he realised she was on the verge of tears. He was probably scaring her to death. "I-I do, Jen," he said, sadly looking at the floor. "I'm sorry I yelled at you, Carrots."

"I know you didn't mean to," she held his hand. "Wanna go outside?"

Nick nodded, still not looking at her. She knew he liked being outside better than staying in a crammed cubicle surrounded by people.

Roar-like thunder and bright flashes of lightning accompanied the heavy rainfall. Nothing else could be heard in the streets, as the two cops were the only ones in them, sheltered under a roof that usually provided shade. The road in from of the building was completely flooded, and if the storm didn't stop, soon the inside of the police department would become waterlogged. Clawhauser was probably going to mop a lot of water away.

"I was not ready."

That caught Judy by surprise. Nick was laying his back against the wall and looking down at the floor. He hadn't said anything for a while and Judy did not expect that. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I knew I'd sooner or later see Finn here. He is what he is, after all. I even psyched myself up to confront him if we came across him while patrolling." Silence. "But this..."

"I'm sorry, Nick."

"I was not ready for this."

Suddenly, Chief Bogo popped up from the main door. "Wilde, Hopps, I've been looking for the two of you. Fawkes says he'll will only speak to you two. I don't approve of officers being involved in cases with personal stuff in them, but this certainly is an exceptional case."

Judy looked at the fox. His face was the face of a frightened mammal, and he shook his head slightly. "I'm not ready for this," his voice broke.

 **Author's notes:**

 **As you see, chapters will not be too long. I'll try to get one or two out per week, but I can't promise I will.**

 **Well, thank you for reading!**


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